“Mmm, is that the alarm? Turn it off, baby, let’s just spend the day sleeping in, okay? Let’s just forget about the world and stay in and fool around and order takeout. Doesn’t that sound completely divine?”

Caleb Grant didn’t want to open his eyes. He didn’t want to open his eyes for two reasons, and he was struggling to decide which was the worst and coming up with a total tie. The first of these things was that he was experiencing a hangover that would probably go down in history as one of his worst. Maybe not the absolute worst, but he had a feeling that when everything was said and done and he was lying on his deathbed (if a deathbed was still a thing, and he wasn’t at all sure it was or that it would be by the time he was ready to be on one), it would definitely have made it into the top ten. Definitely a hall of famer, that was for sure. The alarm had taken him from dead asleep to terribly awake all in one fell swoop, as jarring as any car crash would have been. A car crash felt like an appropriate comparison, too. He felt very much like he’d been in one, or maybe hit by a bus and left in the gutter to die. His head was pounding so badly that it felt like his eyes were pulsing right along with it. His mouth tasted like a sewer, like he really had fallen face down in a gutter and was left there all night long. It was like a small animal had crawled inside of his mouth while he was sleeping and died there, and now he was left to taste the horrible aftermath. It was a pretty horrendous hangover, alright, and one he was sure he would be spending the whole of this day and probably some of the next trying to get over.

The hangover was the first unpleasantry of the morning. The second was the girl. That was something a lot of people probably wouldn’t have considered all that bad, but having some chick in his bed was the last thing Caleb Grant was in the mood for. Maybe if he was a guy who had trouble getting girls into bed he would feel differently, hangover or no hangover, but Caleb was not a man who had trouble with much of anything, and that included women. That was the thing about being rich and powerful. Even if a man wasn’t good looking at all (which Caleb Grant was), money and power could land him almost any chick he wanted. It seemed a little unfair, really, when Caleb took the time to think about it, but he didn’t think about it all that often, and when he did, he was well aware that there wasn’t a whole lot he could do about it. It was just the way of the world. Those who already had a lot always had a much easier time getting more, while those with very little were apt to stay that way without an immense amount of uphill work and a healthy dose of good luck thrown into the mix for good measure. This was something Caleb had been aware of from a very young age. It was a lesson his father had taught him, one of the many Caleb remembered receiving before the wonderful man passed away when Caleb was only eight years old.

Caleb’s father, William Grant, was not born a man of means. No, he was one of those men who fell into Caleb’s second category, someone who was born with nothing and had worked like hell to improve his lot in life. He had grown up in a one-bedroom apartment with four brothers and sisters and a mother, who had been left by his father long enough ago that he might as well not have existed at all. The Grant family struggled, with William dropping out of school at the age of sixteen in order to go to work and help support his mother and the children who were still too little to do anything other than take. He’d gone to work doing construction, which was illegal for a boy his age, but hey, why ask questions when the labor was cheap? It was hard, backbreaking work that forced him to stagger home and slide into the shower with all of his clothes still on. Sometimes the exhaustion and dehydration would be so bad he would throw up right there, the shower running over him and washing away the evidence almost as soon as he had produced it. Those were days when his hands would bleed from tying steel and his mother would almost have to spoon feed him as he nodded off at the dinner table. When he went to bed, he could hear her weeping in her room and praying to God that things would get better for her boy, praying that she wouldn’t go to Hell for allowing him to shoulder so much of the burden that should have been hers.

Caleb’s father had been fond of telling him that those prayers must have been heard by someone, because after a few years, things really started to get better. William worked more than God intended for any man to work (or at least that was what his mom was fond of saying) and he had managed to start putting away a healthy amount of savings on top of the money he gave to the family. When the foreman on one of his construction sites took a liking to him and decided to take him under his wing, things improved even faster. William was shown not only the labor side of the construction business, but the business side of it as well, and when the foreman offered to back him in starting his own company, William gladly accepted. By the time the man died, he was the head of a veritable construction empire. Until the day he died as the result of the copious amounts of asbestos he had been exposed to in his younger years, William Grant had done his very best to instill his son Caleb with an understanding of how fortunate he was and how easy it was to slip back into a position where he had nothing.

Caleb thought about this as he lay in his bed, feeling miserable and terribly sick, and he wondered what his father would think if he could see him now. His father, who had tried so hard to instill in him a belief that hard work was the only real way to succeed, had not only built up a massive and obscenely prosperous company but had played the stock market like a pro as well. He had created a situation for his own family that meant that they would never have to work a hard day in their lives if they didn’t want to. Caleb wanted to please his father, at least when he remembered to try and be a man he could have been proud of, but he felt so far removed from the ghost of his dad and the lessons he had tried to impart that sometimes it felt like they hadn’t happened at all.

Caleb worked, he honest to God did, but he didn’t think it was work his father would have respected all that much. He had a massive company of his own doing advertising and PR. It was a business built on words, and to make matters worse, they were mostly false words. He lived in a lavish Manhattan penthouse while his mother lived in a mansion outside of the city, working hard to forget what it had taken to get to where her husband had gotten her. She was unforgiving, rigid, and completely contemptuous of those she referred to as the “have nots.” It always felt a little to Caleb like she had made it her job to forget her late husband and everything he stood for. Her forgetting made it easier for Caleb to forget too, whether he wanted to or not. His life ran along the lines of the “work hard, play harder” philosophy these days. He really did work hard, but when he wasn’t working, he was drinking and spending time with people who almost definitely wouldn’t have made dear old dad’s list of impressive people.

Case in point, whoever this woman beside him was. Caleb didn’t have a girlfriend. He didn’t have anything even close to a girlfriend, which allowed him complete freedom when it came to his experience with those of the opposite sex. It was something he had always taken advantage of without giving it much concern, but even he was reaching a point where he had to admit to himself that things might be getting out of hand. He couldn’t even count on one hand. He could only give a rough estimate—to tell the truth—on how many times in the last month he’d woken up with a strange girl in his bed. Heavy drinking contributed to his sleeping around, and heavy drinking was definitely responsible for this girl, whoever she was, beside him now, this girl, who was cozying up beside him and clearly hoping to go for round two of whatever the two of them had gotten up to the night before. As if he could have made himself get up to anything like that with his head banging the way it was and his stomach rolling uncomfortably while it decided whether or not to be sick. He felt like that was something she should have just understood, but as if to make a point of the fact that she understood nothing of the sort or that she didn’t give a shit, she pressed her body even closer to his, rocking her hips ever so slightly in what was surely meant to be a suggestive gesture. She was trying to seduce him, and he knew it, but there wasn’t a chance in hell that he was taking the bait. Her body was warm, too warm, and it only managed to make his stomach feel worse. Nope. No way he was bedding this broad again. All he really wanted to do was get her the hell out of his loft so he could be miserable and hungover on his own.

“Baby,” she whined, drawing the annoying, generic pet-name out in a way Caleb had heard before from girls trying to get their way. He absolutely hated it. “Come on now. That alarm is killer, don’t you think? Let’s just call in some food and maybe some champagne. Wouldn’t that be nice? Oh! Does this place have room service? That would be so much fun! It would be so much fun, baby, don’t you think? We can just have the nicest meal, and if you want, you can have me first. I’ll be your appetizer.”  

Room service? Was this girl for real? Where did she think they were, a fucking hotel? Caleb was glad his eyes were still shut because if they had been open there was no way he would have been able to keep from rolling them dramatically. He would have looked like a major asshole, too, which wouldn’t have been great, seeing as he was the one who had invited her to come in. But that had been drunk Caleb, and this was still slightly drunk but mostly hungover Caleb. The things those two versions of himself were interested in were sometimes two complete worlds apart. For a brief moment, he considered trying to explain this to whoever this girl was, but then he thought about the fact that he didn’t even know her name and decided any conversation about the way he was feeling would be completely ludicrous. So instead of doing that, he went to Plan B, which was to get her out as soon as possible. He wanted to get her out of his home, and preferably without her realizing that he had no idea what her name was. He opened his eyes and prepared to do the same old song and dance he had done already more times than he would like to remember.

“You know what, sweetheart? I really hate to disappoint you, but this building actually doesn’t have room service.”

“Aw,” she whined again, sitting up now and looking down at him with eyes circled by mascara so badly that she legitimately looked like a racoon. “That’s such a bummer!”

“I know. It really is.”

“We could order food then!” She started bouncing up and down on her folded legs, making her breasts bounce up and down. He couldn’t look away from them but their motion was also making his nausea worse. “That’s one of the best things about New York, isn’t it? You can get anything delivered, which means that we should totally get champagne. And like, a ton of food. I don’t even remember the last time I was so hungry!”

“Are you?”

“I am, and I have to say, mister, I blame you. You gave me quite the workout last night! And don’t think I was joking about going for another round either. You’re completely delicious.”

Caleb knew she was trying to be sexy, but she was way off the mark. There was very little doubt in his mind now that he was going to be sick, and he wanted to get her out of the loft before it happened. The last thing he needed was her going off and talking to someone about the drunken night she’d spent with the one and only Caleb Grant. No, he needed to have her leave happy, which meant he needed to keep on putting on the best show of his life.

“Well, that makes me happy to hear, babe, it really does. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to disappoint you again, which just about breaks my heart.”

“Oh no! What do you mean?”

“It’s just that I don’t have the luxury of lounging around today, as much as I would like to. That’s why the terrible alarm was set.”

“No!” She pouted again, her lip poking out in a grotesque caricature of a little girl. “You can do whatever you want, right? You are like, the boss, aren’t you?”

“I am,” Caleb answered in a patient voice, exuding a calm that he was nowhere near feeling, “but part of the way you get to be the boss is by showing up. I’m already running late, and I’ve got meetings I just can’t miss.”

“Hold on, are you pulling my leg?”

“Of course not. What on earth would make you say a thing like that?”

“Because. It’s freaking Saturday. Who goes to work and does a bunch of meetings on a Saturday?”

“The boss does, baby. One of the less glamorous things about it.”

“Fine, if you say so. But you owe me, mister, okay? I want a raincheck, for sure.”

“Of course,” he answered quickly, knowing without a shadow of a doubt that he would never see this chick again, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

That seemed to be enough to placate her, and whether she believed it or not, she allowed Caleb’s shallow promise to help usher her out the door. She wrote down her number on a piece of his incredibly expensive stationary but didn’t leave her name, which prompted Caleb to wonder idly if she really thought the night they’d spent together meant something special? He didn’t think so, not really, but even the remote possibility made him feel like shit all over again. Still, he felt a massive weight lift off his chest when she was finally out of his place, the door shut and locked, and he was hardly surprised when he felt just a little bit less sick than he had before. He even managed to keep himself from puking, and after sitting on the floor of his shower for about an hour with the water running cold, he felt like he might live. He had definitely been lying about having meetings, which was a good thing, seeing as there was no way he would have made it to a single one. What he did instead was crawl back into his massive king-sized bed with the four-hundred-dollar sheets and hit the remote control button that dropped the blackout curtains over the wall of windows in his bedroom. He curled up into a little ball, missing his dad brutally and wondering when being an adult became so fucking hard. He drifted off to sleep thinking that and fell into a series of fitful dreams. 

***

“Fuck! What is this, Groundhog Day?!”

Those were the words that came out of Caleb’s mouth many hours later. It was the sound of his phone ringing that had woken him up, but for a minute he was convinced that it was his alarm going off. He was sure it was his alarm going off and that when he opened his eyes the same girl would be lying next to him. She would still be there, and he would be forced to live this day over and over again for God only knew how long, until he learned whatever lesson was required of him. When he came all the way awake, he knew nothing like that was possible, but that didn’t stop him from being unsettled by the thought. If anyone was due for one of those kinds of extreme life lesson situations, it was definitely him, and he knew it. He knew it wasn’t real, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t relieved when he realized that the sound he was hearing was actually his phone and not his alarm. He picked it up with that relief flooding over him, not even caring that his assistant was calling him at three-thirty in the morning. He was a little surprised to see that he had slept for the entire day, but not as surprised as a normal person might be. This wasn’t the only time he’d had a day like this, and if things kept going the way they were going at the moment, he would have another one in his near future.

“Alan.”

“Caleb! Thank God, where have you been?!”

“What do you mean, where have I been?”

“I mean, I’ve called you somewhere around the ballpark of twenty times without getting an answer. I was going to wait a couple of hours and then call the police.”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Alan. I’m fine. And just for the record, if you ever struggle to get ahold to me like you did today, you are in no way supposed to call the cops. Come let yourself into my apartment to make sure I’m still breathing, fine. Call the cops? No, not unless you’ve exhausted all other options. Are we clear on that?”

“Yes, fine, whatever you say. But that’s not what I called you to talk about!”

“I should think not. So why don’t you tell me?”

Caleb fell silent as he listened to what his hyperactive assistant had to say, and by the time the conversation was done, he half wished he really had been in need of the police, that he’d been taken off somewhere, some place that nobody would be able to find him. After hanging up the phone and promising Alan he would be in first thing in the morning, after promising Alan that they would fix this, Caleb stood and padded into a bathroom the size of most people’s entire apartments. With hands braced on the marble countertop, he peered into the mirror and grimaced at what he saw there. At thirty years old, he felt like he was closer to a hundred. He looked like a healthy thirty-year-old male, for the most part, but that wasn’t going to last forever. Underneath his easy-looking tan, he could see that his skin was pale, sickly even. His green eyes were bloodshot and bleary, and there was a small split in his bottom lip that he dimly remembered getting when the girl who had no name from last night had decided to give him a bite. He shook his head, disgusted with where things had wound up. If his father could see him now...he didn’t even like to think about it. All he knew was that things were going downhill quickly, and they were picking up speed.